Cyclone Chido devastated the Mayotte archipelago just a week ago. The help expected by residents is arriving in trickles. Water, food, electricity, and shelter, everything is lacking on the island. Most of the buildings were destroyed by the cyclone because in Mayotte, there are a lot of precarious, fragile homes, made only of sheet metal. According to INSEE, a third of the inhabitants of Mayotte live in a slum. Decryption with sociologist Jean Viard.
franceinfo: In this context of devastation and precarious habitats razed by the cyclone, how to rebuild Mayotte, where to start?
Jean Viard: We start with what we are trying to do, that is to say the emergency, to bring from Reunion which is not very far – there is a little more than 1000 kilometers – food, water, etc. There is an emergency and we already experienced this in 2017, with the cyclone on Saint-Martin. So state services know how to manage this kind of crisis. There, there are three times more inhabitants than in Saint-Martin, but they have already been able to manage that. The second thing, obviously, is compassion, respect, the day of national mourning for a French territory destroyed in this way, it actually seems to me a good idea.
But then, I make three remarks. The first is that if we want everyone to get to work, we have to give everyone papers, because we estimate that there are around 100,000 undocumented people. We need all hands on deck, and people need to not hide, for fear of being expelled. We must mobilize survivors.
The second thing is to think local. We must tell local architects to lead the reconstruction, they are not people from far away, Parisians, major civil servants. There are architects there and they know the materials, the wind, the land, etc., who know, because one of the big problems is that we built on rotten land, on slopes, and places that are much more dangerous.
And then the third remark that I will make, I find it distressing that one of the great French politicians says: ““It's an immigration problem.” the other said: “We have to make the rich pay.”. Isn't there a little modesty to ensure that the Parisian-centric debates, which already no longer interest the French very much, are not relaunched in such a tragic period?
1 in 3 residents live in precarious housing in Mayotte, 4 in 10 homes are made of sheet metal, 3 in 10 do not have running water. These are the figures from INSEE. How did we get there on French territory?
I think that France no longer has any thoughts on how to provide development projects to these territories, each time differently. It is the locals who must carry out this project. They are the only ones who can adapt to this territory. Then, in Mayotte, there are the problems of the Comorians which arise precisely because we are less poor, so to speak, in Mayotte than in the Comoros.
We will have to start thinking about these territories because we think about them by saying: France is the second maritime power in the world. France controls the Mozambique Channel thanks to Mayotte. This is all geostrategy. The question is when are we really going to say to ourselves: what future do we give to these territories? I think that there is a real deficit in thought, I was going to say of the State, overall in these territories.
The inhabitants of Mayotte feel abandoned by the metropolis during this period of crisis. The President of the Republic visited the site this week and declared a day of national mourning on Monday, December 23. Does this remain a recognition of the seriousness of the event on the part of Paris?
It’s clear that people are desperate, unhappy, thirsty. They have all lost loved ones, they don't know who is dead, who is not dead. There is terrible disarray and for the President of the Republic to be yelled at by people, it's obvious, it's logical. There is terrible despair. Afterwards, we have to go, that's the role of elected officials: to effectively confront this suffering, propose a certain number of things and say how, little by little, we will rebuild trust.
That's why I started by saying the first confidence, it's to give papers to everyone so that that is no longer the issue, and that everyone gets into the fight to build and to rebuild. First we repair, we finance, it will cost billions, we help people to live, and then we start to think about these territories, and give them the hand of their destiny.
But that won't take away a thing. We have entered the era of climatic disasters, it will happen again there or elsewhere. This is why we must produce less CO2, and this is why we must protect ourselves in all territories of the world. But as far as we are concerned firstly, obviously, on the French territories.
